>You have NEVER effectively "BTDT", as you claim at some >length in your response of Oct 1, 2010 4:30 AM to >Richard Strausz's explication to me of "BTDT" - mainly >because the gurus of management science have not yet >learned how to do No. (3) above and it is not yet a >part of the 'debating culture'.

Ah, I see the point of our misunderstanding. Education is not a management problem.

You see, the Education Mafia does not need help in developing, or clarifying, or implementing their ideas. They are quite effective at that, already. Their ideas are well developed, well promoted, and thoroughly implemented.

No one who has been paying any attention to American education issues in the last few years can be in any doubt or confusion about education ideas and practice. For instance, we all know exactly what the Whole Language reading method is. If not, it is a cinch to research the issue. Oh, one can debate the theory that underpins it, but we know what it is.

Furthermore, we know the effectiveness Whole Language, completely. Indeed, we know the overall effectiveness of our schools in some detail. GS, there are, quite simply, no mysteries about the American public school. At any rate, there are no technical mysteries amenable to a technical systems analysis.

There may be a few psychological problems among educators. For example, several generations of highly intelligent and experienced people, around the world, have produced scores, if not hundreds, of arithmetic textbooks over the decades. Yet, there are a couple of correspondents in another discussion forum who are working out yet another arithmetic textbook which they think will solve all our math education ills.

What could they possibly be thinking? Either they are unteachably ignorant of the history of math education or they are monumentally egotistical to imagine they can produce the one textbook that eluded all the others who came before them.

My own view is that so many different arithmetic textbooks have been tried over so many years with so many students, that it is now abundantly clear that whatever ails math education cannot be solved with another arithmetic textbook. If we know nothing else about math education, we know this: the problem lies elsewhere.

Well, curing this apparent delusion is not a job for management science, it is a job for psychiatry.